Our personal essays are due on Friday. In journalism class on Monday, Ms. Archer hands out copies of a couple of published personal essays that she thinks are models of everything a personal essay should be. One of them is about the day someone realized that she was more racist than she had thought she was. It made me squirm, in a good way, because the author was willing to be so honest about something bad about herself. I’m not so good at owning up to my faults. The other essay is light and funny until the very end, when it stabs you in the heart. The author’s cat does all these hilarious and ridiculous things but then goes outside one day and never comes back.
“What’s this one about?” Ms. Archer asks, after she finishes reading the cat essay out loud to us.
I’m not sure. I think it’s about how it’s worth it to be fully alive, even if there are risks involved. But I stay a quiet lurker.
“Cameron?” Ms. Archer asks, even though, as far as I can tell, Cameron hasn’t given any signal that he has something to say. He’s still just doodling, doodling, doodling.
He answers without looking up. “It’s better to go outside and get hit by a car than to live your life trapped inside. It’s better to die all at once, not by inches.”
I love his answer. I love that it’s what I was going to say, only in different words. Now I wish I had raised my hand, so he’d know that he and I thought the same thing.
“All right,” Ms. Archer says, once we’ve talked more about the two sample essays, with Olivia raising her hand four times to offer her insights about their structure. “Let’s do another freewrite. Disregard everything we said in analyzing these two pieces to death”—is that a jab at Olivia? Oh, I hope it is!—“and write your little hearts out. Here’s your prompt for the next few minutes: something you don’t like about yourself.”
I should have known she’d do that one, given that I had just been thinking how I don’t like writing bad things about myself. Especially when I’m sitting next to Cameron and he might look over and see what I’m writing, not that he’s ever given any sign of interest in me—well, until our last conversation about Hunter.
So I sit there paralyzed.
What don’t I like about myself?
My flat chest. As if I’m going to write about that!
Being too tall. It’s pitiful to care about something so trivial.
Okay. Maybe what I don’t like about myself is that I do care about a lot of shallow, pitiful things. I do care too much about what other people think about me. When you get right down to it, my get-published-soon plan is about impressing other people, especially other people named Cameron and Hunter and Olivia. But what’s the point of being a writer if you’re not going to try to connect with a reader, preferably with lots of readers? The authors who wrote the racism essay and the cat essay—didn’t they care about being read by other human beings? If they didn’t, why did they have their essays published rather than leaving them in a drawer? Most writers are not like Emily Dickinson.
Then I see that Cameron has written something: something very short, in the far corner of his blank page. It looks like a haiku.
I roll my shoulders and rotate my head as if I’m doing some physical therapy exercise to help with writer’s block, holding the pose for an extra second as I strain to read what Cameron has written. But his writing is sort of like calligraphy, with fancy little flourishes that make it hard to decipher, especially if you’re pretending not to be trying to read it in the first place.
Then Cameron turns his paper toward me.
I feel myself flushing scarlet. He must think that’s just the color I am all the time: beet red.
I could try to act puzzled—Oh, wait, did you think I was looking at your paper?—but there’s really no point to that now. So I just read what he’s written.
I can’t see myself
Only what the mirror shows
But all mirrors lie
I love it.
If The New Yorker published haiku—and I didn’t see any haiku there either—they would definitely publish this. It’s so deep and wise and true. It takes the whole “what don’t you like about yourself” prompt and turns it inside out. How can we know what we like or don’t like about ourselves, when we can’t even see ourselves, we can only see what the mirror shows? And what Cameron wrote connects with what I didn’t write, about how I care too much about what other people think.
I can’t help smiling at Cameron.
“It’s beautiful,” I whisper.
Cameron doesn’t return my smile or acknowledge my praise. He starts doodling all over the rest of the page and keeps on doodling. And for the first time this trimester, I don’t write anything either. Instead I just sit and chant Cameron’s haiku over and over again to myself.
Then in the last minute of class, I write a mirror haiku of my own:
No mirror shows me
An image more real and true
Than one that is cracked.
I can’t help myself: just before the bell is about to ring, I turn my paper so Cameron can see it.
As I suck in my breath, he reads it and gives a curt nod. Of approval? Or just acknowledgment?
I like his haiku better than mine. But I like mine, too. I think it’s deep. I think it’s even profound. I like that we wrote them, side by side, together, on the same day.